


The Last Great Innocent(s)

by commoncomitatus



Series: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 7 [2]
Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: F/F, Referenced Slavery, Role Reversal, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 15:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7512793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tag for "Remember Nothing", wherein Xena does not leave Gabrielle to change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Great Innocent(s)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Hurt/Comfort Bingo](http://hc-bingo.livejournal.com) Round 7.  
> Prompt: Unwanted Transformation

—

“I’ll leave you to change,” she says, but she doesn’t.

She should. She knows it. The girl in front of her is not the Gabrielle she knows; she’s a slave, newly freed, and she has no reason to trust in the kindness of a stranger.

Xena wants her to learn that she can trust her, that she should trust her. She wants her to learn, slowly and carefully, that in another time and place, another reality, she trusted her completely and it was the most beautiful thing in the world. She wants her to feel safe, to understand that she _is_ safe. She wants to reawaken her to all the things that her Gabrielle knows by heart, but she can’t. Not here, and not like this.

Those things won’t happen overnight, and they definitely won’t happen while someone who claims to be a kind stranger is breathing down her neck. Just the idea of freedom is still so new and strange to this Gabrielle, and Xena knows it’s not something she can force. It hasn’t sunk in yet, the weight of all this and what it means for her.

She needs time. She needs to be left alone to process it, to rediscover in her own time and at her own pace the world beyond the walls and the whips, a world where she is free and safe and loved, a world far away from the one that’s lost, the one where Gabrielle was the stranger showing kindness, where Xena was the one who had learned never to trust anyone.

Xena knows that she needs to leave. She needs to let Gabrielle change, and not just her clothes. She needs to give her space to learn for the first time the things the other Gabrielle knew by instinct, light and love and warmth, the things that she taught Xena, that Xena is still learning from her, even here. She needs room to breathe; she needs to learn that she _can_ breathe, that she’s allowed to, that she will never again be beaten for it.

Xena should leave. She knows it. But still she doesn’t.

Gabrielle doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t tell her to go, doesn’t ask why she hasn’t. She just stands there like a stone, as though waiting for the other shoe to drop, the kindness to fall away and reveal something sinister lurking underneath.

Xena’s used to being looked at like that, of course. She’s used to being met with scowling and white jaws, used to people assuming the worst when they see her coming. She’s used to the fear and the anger, used to insults gritted out through clenched teeth and curses spat through sneering lips. Everything she sees in Gabrielle’s eyes right now, she’s seen a thousand times before in a thousand places from a thousand faces. She’s lived with it for so much of her life that she’s learned to expect it. She’d long since given up hope of ever changing that, of ever meeting someone who could look at her and smiled.

Until Gabrielle.

 _Her_ Gabrielle. The one she knows, the one she remembers even as the rest of that life flickers and fades. The one she loves, more deeply than she’d ever admit. The one who followed her all the way from Poteidaia to Amphipolis, who never takes ‘no’ for an answer, who trusted her in a world when no-one else would even meet her eye.

That Gabrielle doesn’t exist any more. Xena erased her and replaced her with this, a slave girl standing still as a stone, silent as death, who can’t remember what kindness means or how to trust.

That silence, that stone-stillness splits Xena’s heart in two. Compassion is still so new to her, so unexpected and unfamiliar, but when she looks at this Gabrielle and remembers the other one, it comes as naturally as breathing.

She wants to hold her. Such a simple thing, but so impossible. Xena has never taken anything for granted in her life, but she wishes now that she’d held on a little tighter back when she had the chance. She wants to pull her into her arms and never let her go, to remind her how friendship tastes, how love tastes between the two of them. She wants to kiss the top of her head, her temples, her cheek, all the places she’s kissed before. She wants to show this Gabrielle everything she’s only just beginning to show the other, love in the deepest places. She wants to do so much, but she knows she can’t. Those things mean something very different here.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

Gabrielle stares at her. She looks so empty, so vacant, so far away from the warmth and the soul and the heart that Xena remembers. She almost doesn’t recognise her.

“What for?” she asks. Her voice is a terrible thing, the crushed steel of someone expecting a blow but refusing to be afraid. “What could you have to be sorry for?”

 _Everything,_ Xena thinks, but of course she can’t say that.

This version of reality is the only one this Gabrielle has ever known. She never had the chance to learn and grow and become a storyteller; she never had the chance to travel the world the way her younger self must have once dreamed of. She never had the chance to imagine all the things she could be, much less find them inside herself. Slavery rips the soul right out of you, leaves you raw and bare with nothing inside but poison and pain. Xena knows that all too well; she’s owned enough herself.

Even now, with her freedom spread out in front of her, this Gabrielle doesn’t trust her. Given time, she might, but for the time being the idea is so far away that it might as well be stuck in that other reality. She tenses up when Xena reaches for her, turns her face away when she looks at her, squares her shoulders when she opens her mouth, always waiting for a command or a blow. Xena already knows that she was no stranger to either in her former home.

“It’s not important,” she says.

It _is_ important. The apology, and everything behind it. It is so, so important, but of course she can’t say it. She can’t say any of the things she wants to, and it pulls her apart to look into Gabrielle’s face and see only confusion.

Her Gabrielle wouldn’t have needed the words. She would have understood. She always does, no matter how irrational or unreasonable Xena is. She’s so good at reading her, so good at _seeing_ her; she would have seen through the tight smile in a heartbeat, without even trying. She would have looked her in the eye and murmured _“Xena,”_ in that high, sweet voice she uses sometimes, the one that makes Xena want to share every part of herself. She would have nudged her shoulder or her ribs, linked their arms together, and laughed.

This Gabrielle doesn’t do any of those things. Xena wonders when she last heard the sound of laughter that wasn’t followed by someone else’s tears.

“If you say so,” Gabrielle mumbles after a moment, then shrugs and turns away.

She’s not afraid. That’s the first thing Xena noticed about her, yesterday at the market. She’s all coiled tension and swallowed venom, bracing for each blow but never, ever flinching. Xena felt her heart crack then, and she feels it crack a little more now. She’s seen and owned and known enough slaves to know that there are only two ways they can survive: fear or hate. They can cringe and cower their way through life, suffering and struggling to stay afloat every day until death finally puts them out of their misery, or they can keep themselves alive by pure force of will, driven on by rage and revenge fantasies, dreaming of the day when they grow strong enough to rise up and break the master who spends his day breaking them.

Of the two, Xena never, ever thought she would see the latter in Gabrielle.

Maybe she should have. In hindsight, it seems so obvious. The Gabrielle she knows, even in her innocence, fights like a bear when she believes in something. She would do whatever it takes to right a wrong or make good an injustice, and when the whim takes her she’s ferocious. Her anger, rare though it is, is a force to be reckoned with when it strikes, and it’s beautiful. She reminds Xena so much of—

 _Lyceus_.

The name bursts in her chest like a cry, and she bites down on her lip until it hurts to keep from letting out the sound. Even now, she can’t believe he’s still alive, can’t believe he’s _here_ , at her side where he always belonged. She wants to be overjoyed, wants to feel like the Fates have given her a gift beyond measure. She wants to feel more at peace than she does when she looks around and sees this world they created for her, the gift of mistakes undone. She wants to feel grateful, wants to hold on to the joy she feels when she sees Lyceus smile.

She tries, truly she does, but it’s harder than she thought to feel that way when the price of that joy is all around her. Her mother is dead, lying at rest in the same place Lyceus once did. And now this Gabrielle, this shattered shell of a slave so unlike herself that Xena can’t find her at all.

She shakes her head, shakes off the thoughts. This is her world now. Whatever the cost, this is the life she has. Only the gods can take mercy on her mother, but this Gabrielle is not beyond her. She just needs time. She just needs space. She just needs…

“I’ll leave you to change,” she says again.

Gabrielle goes tense all over. Xena watches her hands as they tug at the fabric of her mother’s dress.

“No, you won’t,” she says.

It’s not spoken particularly contrarily — it’s just a statement, as flat and empty as the look in her eyes — but the fact that she spoke out at all makes it that way. Xena can tell that she wants it to be a test or a threat, that she’s trying to make her voice hard and cold, to push the boundaries, but the stone in her body has spread to her voice as well. She doesn’t sound vicious or defiant; she just sounds numb. It’s such a strange sound from a woman Xena knows to be so full of life.

She’s sounded that way every time she’s opened her mouth here, though. Hollow. Distant. Faded. Like she’s barely here at all, like she’s barely even human. Xena wonders if she truly feels that way, or if it’s an aura she’s cultivated to spite Mezentius, to strip him of the pleasure he’d get from seeing her broken. She’s not sure which would hurt more.

“Do you want me to?” she asks, as gently as she can. “I’ll understand if you need space.”

Gabrielle stares at her. She’s still so tense, still bracing for a blow she has to believe is coming, still waiting for judgement to rain down from above, a thunderbolt from Zeus himself only more painful. Xena doesn’t know how to make her relax, how to soften those too-hard muscles into something comfortable, how to transform that tight, twisted body into the one she knows it should be, the one she knows.

“It’s your house,” Gabrielle says at last. She twitches just a little, but doesn’t flinch. “Do what you want.”

Xena shakes her head. She can’t stand this emptiness, this lack of feeling. She can’t stand looking into the eyes of the woman she loves and seeing only a hollow void. “Gabrielle…”

Without thinking, she closes the space between them. Gabrielle still doesn’t flinch, but she drops her shoulders, hunching over her ribs, her stomach, her groin, so accustomed to being hit that she can’t think of any other reason why someone might reach for her like this. How long has it been, Xena wonders queasily, since she felt a touch borne of anything but brutality?

“Oh,” she says, and the quiet realisation in her voice makes Xena want to cry. “I guess I should’ve known. People like you always want the same thing.”

She’s trying so hard to sound bitter, to be angry and spiteful and cold, but she can’t. There’s nothing in her at all, just weariness and the weight of too many lessons. She sounds _defeated_ , like maybe there was a part of her that did dare to hope after all, and the sight of her like this, deflating despite her best efforts not to, is in its own way almost more horrifying than what she’s implying.

Slowly, carefully, Xena shakes her head. “It’s not like that,” she says.

“Sure it’s not.” Gabrielle huffs a laugh, the sound as empty and lifeless as her body. “Nothing like being a slave, right? You’ll _pay_ , right?”

“Gabrielle!”

The shout bursts out of her automatically, before she can stop it, and for the first time Gabrielle does flinch. Not at the sharp tone or the sudden volume, like Xena expects, but seemingly at the sound of her own name. She doesn’t know how to react to it, doesn’t know whether it’s a promise or a threat, and the sound makes her body seize up for a moment.

It’s not the first time she’s reacted like this. Xena remembers the way she responded earlier when it slipped out, backing away with her eyes narrowed, instantly defensive and ready to flee. The name upset her, more even than the tightness of Xena’s grip as she pulled her back.

Xena supposes it shouldn’t be so surprising — she’s known slaves who couldn’t even remember their names, so rare was it to hear them spoken — but with Gabrielle, so changed in this world, so transformed from everything she should be, she finds that, once again, it all feels new, the experience striking at her on a new level, in a way it never did before. Suddenly, these things she knows as second nature are unexpected; suddenly, they hurt.

She takes a moment, and a deep breath. “Gabrielle,” she says again, much softer this time. She doesn’t want her name associated with unpleasantness.

Gabrielle doesn’t look at her. “Just get it over with,” she mutters.

Xena wonders if she took that tone with Mezentius. Probably not, she reasons. If she did, she wouldn’t have lived long enough to be rescued by a warrior princess from another reality.

“You trust me,” she whispers, the words shaping the realisation. “You wouldn’t talk to me like that if you didn’t.”

“I don’t trust,” Gabrielle counters. Her voice is empty again, completely this time. She’s not even trying to sound vengeful or spiteful now; she’s just trying to get the words out as painlessly as possible. “I just don’t care what happens to me any more.”

Xena swallows hard. She hates that she’s seen this happen, hates how easy it is to believe now that she hears it.

“I care,” she says. Her voice breaks, her heart cracking with it.

Gabrielle straightens up just slightly. The dress hangs limp in her hands now, all but forgotten, and Xena takes a chance on reaching in to take it from her, to smooth out some of the wrinkles Gabrielle’s twisting hands have put there. She never really liked the dress, but her mother loved it dearly, and knowing that she’s gone in this reality, that she’ll never see her again, suddenly Xena sees the thing through new eyes. Fitting, she thinks, that Gabrielle should be the one to wear it now.

“You shouldn’t,” Gabrielle is telling her. “I’m just a slave. An animal.”

“You are _not_ …” Xena starts, but she chokes on a flood of emotion, and the words die.

Gabrielle meets her eyes again. Hers are grey and colourless, and that makes Xena’s own well with tears. The Gabrielle she remembers carried whole worlds in hers.

“Get it over with,” Gabrielle says again. “Take me, or give me to your man, or sell me back to Mezentius. Whatever you want. I don’t care.” But her voice breaks too, and it gives her away. “Just do _something_.”

Xena doesn’t answer. For the first time in years, she’s speechless.

She didn’t expect anything like this. When the Fates came to her outside their temple, when they gave her a second chance at the life she thought she’d thrown away, she didn’t know what to think. She’s learned time and time again never to accept anything from immortals and their kind, and certainly never to take it at face value. She knew there would be a catch to this so-called ‘gift’ of theirs, that a perfect world will never be never as perfect as it seems. She knew that they would want to see her struggle, that they are probably still here right now, lurking in the shadows, watching and waiting for her to give this up, to return to the old world with fresh eyes and hard-won enlightenment.

She won’t, though. She can’t. This brave new world of hers doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be better than the one she left behind.

She knows the sacrifices this place has made for her sake. Her mother is dead in this reality, her life exchanged for Lyceus’s, and that’s a burden Xena will have to live with every time she thinks of her. She regrets it, of course, but a part of her can’t help wondering if it’s kinder this way, if her mother is better off never having seen her daughter’s fall from grace. In the other reality it was a long, hard road to forgiveness, and the two of them have only just started to repair their damaged relationship. Isn’t it better, she wonders, that her mother be laid to rest before she had a chance to suffer that shame?

That’s not the same as this, though. It’s one thing to find a silver lining in her mother’s death, in knowing that she never learned to hate her own daughter, but it’s something else entirely to see Gabrielle so reduced.

Gabrielle is the purest, truest, kindest soul Xena has ever met. Gabrielle has faith in everything, but none so strong as the faith she has in Xena; there’s a light inside her that burns brightest when it looks at her, when it sees not the warlord who might have conquered the world but the warrior princess who turned away from her past and worked to change her present. Gabrielle was everything Xena needed in her life in the very moment she needed it most. She was, and still is, her inspiration, the name given to that new fire in her chest that makes her want to be a better person.

The old Xena needed Gabrielle. She was her path, her journey, her strength. But this Xena isn’t like that Xena, no more than this Gabrielle is like the other. This Xena never took up the sword, never stood against Cortese; she ran away with Lyceus to a place where it was safe. She kept him alive, kept her own conscience clean, and she doesn’t need Gabrielle’s any more. She doesn’t need some sweet, innocent soul to remind her of what is good or right; good and right are all this Xena has ever known. She doesn’t need guidance or a moral compass or unconditional love when she has Lyceus. This Xena doesn’t need that Gabrielle.

Maybe she needs this one instead. Or then again, maybe this one needs her. A broken, bitter Gabrielle and an innocent, untainted Xena, still there for each other but in the opposite way. How kind, and how cruel, the way the Fates weave their threads together. There’s a kind of poetry in that, Xena thinks, somewhere beneath all the bitter irony. The old Gabrielle would have loved it.

But she’s not here.

 _“That’s not me,”_ this Gabrielle said when Xena described the other one. Looking at her now, she suspects that her Gabrielle would say exactly the same thing. _That’s not me. That can’t be me. She’s lost everything that makes me what I am._

It’s true. Maybe this time it’s down to Xena to help her get it back.

She steps forward again, much slower this now, not wanting to startle her. Gabrielle watches her carefully, like a trapped animal searching for an escape route, eyes narrowed and shoulders tight and hunched. She’s still waiting for an attack, Xena thinks sadly. She’s so used to it that she’s past the point of expecting or anticipating; so far as she’s concerned, it’s just inevitable, not _if_ but _when_. It’s the only outcome she can imagine, the only thing she can see in any version of her future.

Xena will show her that’s not true any more. Her future is her own now, and Xena will do whatever it takes to make sure that no-one puts a hand on her ever again.

“You’re free, Gabrielle,” she says, not for the first time. She keeps her words slow too, as steady as her step. “You’re not a slave any more. Not now, not ever. Do you understand? You’ll never, ever be a slave again.”

Gabrielle frowns up at her. Somehow, she seems taller than the one Xena knows. Maybe it’s the way she always seems to be hunching her shoulders, bending forward to protect herself; it gives the illusion that she could be so much bigger if she’d only straighten up a little, if she could only remember how to do that. Xena has never felt that way about her Gabrielle. She’s little more than a girl, eager and open and always moving; when Xena looks at her, she sees something small and precious, something to be sheltered and kept safe. This Gabrielle is nothing like that; the world has already hardened her body to stone. She just needs Xena to teach her how to sculpt it.

“It won’t work,” Gabrielle is saying. She’s speaking slowly too, but for very different reasons. “Whatever you’re trying to accomplish here. Trying to make me more like your friend.” She bites her lip for a moment, not coy but contemplative. “Why?”

It’s not the first time she’s asked that question. That she’s brave enough to ask questions at all after the life she’s lived speaks volumes, and Xena struggles to find a smile.

“Because I…” The smile fades, dissolving as the truth hits. “Because she’s not with me any more.”

“That’s your problem,” Gabrielle says. Her eyes are on Cyrene’s dress. “Not mine. You can’t make me like that. All full of… what was it you said? Wonder and stories? That’s not me. I don’t have those things in me.”

Gods, this is painful. “I think you do,” she says. “I think, when you were a little girl, you had all sorts of stories inside you. I think you told them to anyone who’d listen, spreading wonder everywhere you went. I think you spent hours on hours talking to whatever strangers passed through your village, so hungry to learn about the world outside. I think you dreamed of seeing it, of becoming a part of something more than the life you were born to.”

Gabrielle looks struck for a moment, like she’s in a different kind of pain, raw and visceral but very new. Once upon a time, Xena might have wondered how such a thing was possible, how a few simple words could ever hurt more than a lash or a fist. Once. But then she met Gabrielle, and she has been rent through so many times by her words that it’s almost like a second heartbeat to feel them squeeze the air out of her. She understands exactly how this Gabrielle feels. It hurts her too.

“I wouldn’t know,” Gabrielle says at last. “I don’t even remember what my life was like before. Funny thing about being a slave: after a while, you stop wanting to remember.”

“Why?”

The question spills out of her before she can stop it, and she regrets it immediately. She knows the answer; she knew it even before she heard the words.

She’s had slaves herself. Grown men and women, even young girls like this Gabrielle, and she knows all the best ways to break them. She knows why they stop wanting to remember, why they drown what little ember of hope might still live inside them. She knows what a breaking point looks like, knows the moment it becomes easier to pretend that the beatings and the brutality are all they ever knew, that _‘like an animal’_ is all they ever were. She knows, and she hates herself because she does still remember, because even though the world has changed she has not, and she wishes she didn’t know how it feels to look down on a girl like this and smile when they forget their name.

Gabrielle studies her for a long, long time. Xena recognises the look on her face, caution and suspicion with just a hint of defiance. She’s testing her, trying to see how far she can push her, how much disobedience she has to show before her ‘friendly’ new owner turns around and shows her true colours. It makes Xena’s stomach seethe, makes her chest tighten in a way she hasn’t felt in many years.

“Forget it,” Gabrielle says at last, and this time when her shoulders hunch it’s with defeat. “It doesn’t matter. A pretty girl like you… be thankful you don’t understand.”

In spite of herself, Xena has to smile at that. The words are hard, viciously untruthful, though of course this version of Gabrielle couldn’t possible know that, but it’s the way she says _‘girl’_ that lights her up inside. Xena is much older than Gabrielle, this one or any other, and she’s always looked older than her own years too. Driven as she was by violence for so much of her life, she’s aged very quickly, and not in a good way. It’s been more than a decade since anyone looked at her and saw something like a girl.

Maybe this life, the simple, peaceful life, has shaved off the years she lost when she took up the sword. Then again, maybe this Gabrielle just sees her through the same eyes her counterpart did, as someone more pure, more innocent than she ever was or ever will be. It’s hard to tell.

“Gabrielle,” she says, but she’s not talking to the slave this time.

“I’m not like your friend,” Gabrielle tells her again, as though she can see the shades of her other self reflected in Xena’s eyes. “You’re not going to make me like her by putting me in a dress.”

Xena looks down at the dress. She sets it aside for the moment, and takes Gabrielle’s wrists in her hands instead. Gabrielle sucks in her breath, but she doesn’t flinch or pull away. It’s not acquiescence, Xena knows, or acceptance or even fear of reprimand; it’s just resignation, the beaten-in certainty that she can’t control what happens to her, that she has no power over herself, her body, or her fate.

Xena wants to kiss away that feeling, to show her just how precious she is, how much she means to her, but she doesn’t. This Gabrielle might not be afraid, might not allow herself to be afraid, but Xena is. She is terrified of breaking her like she’s been broken before.

“You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to,” she says. Gabrielle’s wrists, even in the softest places, are rough under the pads of her fingers; they’re nothing like her Gabrielle’s, so soft everywhere. “I just thought you’d like a new start. New clothes, new…”

“It’s not, though, is it?” She says it flatly, without emotion, like she says everything. Xena will never, ever get used to that. “The clothes aren’t new. They’re your mother’s. And I… I’m never going to be new. Not really. Whatever you do, however you dress me or look at me or talk to me, I’m still damaged goods. I always will be.”

“You’re not damaged goods,” Xena chokes out. “You’re not any kind of goods. You’re—”

“I’m a _slave_. That’s the only thing I know how to be. If you think you can change that just by changing my clothes, you’re dreaming.”

Xena doesn’t believe that. She can’t believe it. She has to believe that she can transform this Gabrielle, that she can make her like her old self, her other self, the version of herself that never had to suffer or struggle or hurt like this. 

She didn’t mean for this to happen. All she wanted was to give a young boy his life back, to right a wrong she inflicted in the heat of battle. She didn’t ask the Fates to rewrite the world, to rewrite her life, her brother’s and her mother’s and Gabrielle’s, but they did. They gave Xena back her innocence, the wide-eyed places inside her, the parts of her that make her look younger than she is, that make this Gabrielle roll her eyes and call her a girl. They gave her back so much, so many things and feelings she’d thought she’d never know or feel again, but in giving them back to her, they took them away from the one person who truly deserves them.

Xena won’t go back to the other world, the one where Gabrielle was hers, where she sang her bard’s songs and told her stories and gazed up at her with wonder, when they lived and loved and were together in all the ways that mattered. Whatever terrible things exist in this reality, none of them compare to the terrible things Xena did when she was a conqueror. Whatever the cost, she will not inflict herself on the world again.

It’s hard, though. It is so, so hard. This Gabrielle is so changed, so much of everything Xena would die to protect her from. The sight of her like this, so empty and hollow and numb, the knowledge of what she must have been through to make her that way… it fills Xena with a depth of grief that she hasn’t known since Lyceus died.

She tells herself it’s enough that he, at least, was made new. It’s enough, at last for now, to look around herself and know that he’s not dead here, that he’s still alive and healthy and whole, as pure and good as she remembers him. Gabrielle is a mistake she can fix; she has to keep telling herself that. She can dig down deep inside this shell of a woman and find the wonder and the stories she knows are hidden there, the life she’s let herself forget. She will find her Gabrielle in this one, even if it takes both of their lives. The other Xena won’t ever be able to save Lyceus, but this one can save Gabrielle. She has to.

 _I can change you,_ she thinks, brushing the undersides of Gabrielle’s wrists with her thumbs. _I’ll reignite the light that used to shine in you. I’ll tell you all the stories you’ve forgotten. I’ll bring you back, Gabrielle, I promise. I won’t break the world again, but I’ll do whatever it takes to fix you, to help you become the person I know you are._

“I can try,” she says aloud, and lets go of her wrists.

Gabrielle tenses when she touches her face, her hair, when she reaches up to gently pull the rag from her head. She’s tight as a whip, resistant but utterly unafraid; she’s convinced that she knows what’s coming, and she won’t give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her frightened. _Brave_ , Xena thinks, filled with her own kind of wonder. It doesn’t matter where they are; whatever the world or the reality, Gabrielle is always so unfathomably brave. Xena wants to tell her how amazing that is, how amazing _she_ is. She wants her to see how much strength she has inside of her, just waiting to be let out.

She can’t control the way she leans in, the way she kisses her forehead and lets her lips linger. The tenderness comes without thought, a reflex reaction (or so her Gabrielle says) to the swell of feeling in her chest.

Gabrielle doesn’t respond. The one Xena knows would smile and sigh, lean into the contact and into her arms, let Xena hold her until the feeling ebbs into something she can breathe through. Even before their relationship grew, she relished little intimacies like this, lingering touches and unexpected kisses, the moments when Xena forgot herself, forgot the person she was and thought only of the person she wants to be, the person she can almost see when Gabrielle looks at her like she hangs the whole world. Moments like this, fleeting and unplanned, are the breath of life to her Gabrielle, but this one isn’t breathing at all.

Xena pulls away, searches her face for signs of life, for anger or fear or even confusion, but there’s nothing there at all. It’s like looking into a void.

“It’s okay,” she says, but she doesn’t know if it’s getting through, if Gabrielle can even hear her. “It’s all right. I’m just… I just…”

Gabrielle blinks once. That’s all. A blink, without even a flicker of recognition, and then she goes back to staring at her like she’s only partly here.

Xena’s heart is ready to break, all those little cracks coming together until she wants to shatter completely. She’s never had to try this hard before, never had to wonder if she’s being heard. Not by Gabrielle. She’s never looked into her eyes and found them hollow, never looked into her face and seen only stone.

Gabrielle — her Gabrielle — is so open all the time. She exposes herself so willingly, even eagerly, never even realising how remarkable that is. She wears her heart, her soul, every part of her on her sleeve, out there for everyone to see, and the real miracle is that she seems to like it that way. Good or bad, she wants the whole world to know what she’s feeling. Xena has never known that kind of honesty, and the sight of it in someone like Gabrielle, so pure and kind and so devastatingly beautiful, is a constant, endless source of strength and hope and peace.

Xena doesn’t know how to deal with this version of her, how to communicate with someone so hollowed out, how to find the soul she knows has to be hiding inside of her somewhere. She doesn’t know what to do when everything she loves has been stripped away, when the surface is razed so raw that even looking at it chips a little more away.

“Gabrielle…” she says again, desperate for even just a tiny piece of the woman she loves.

Her shoulders lift, tilting in a kind of resigned half-shrug, and then she pulls away completely. She’s still not speaking, still barely even acknowledging Xena at all, and when she moves to pull off the ragged, torn-up slave’s shirt, it’s with an automated detachment that makes Xena want to weep for her. She lifts it up over her head, mechanical and practiced, and lets it fall to the floor at her feet.

“I don’t understand you,” she says. She doesn’t try to cover herself at all, just stands there naked from the waist up as though it’s completely normal. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“I don’t want anything,” Xena says. “I’m not… I don’t…”

But the words die in her when she lets her gaze drift down and measure out the marks this world has left on this Gabrielle, the dozens of reasons, large and small, why she is the way she is, why she is nothing like the woman Xena knows and loves. There will be more under the moth-eaten skirt, she knows, but what she sees now is enough to steal the breath from her body, to grind her bones into dust.

“…oh, Gabrielle,” she whispers, and everything else is forgotten.

Gabrielle looks down at herself. She’s frowning again, the way she does when she looks at Xena, when she’s searching her face for ulterior motives, for anger or lust or another kind of danger.

“Like I said,” she grits out, “be thankful you don’t understand.”

But, of course, Xena _does_ understand. That’s a big part of what makes this so dreadful. She’s owned slaves herself, and not all of them were treated well. She was a cruel owner, a cruel warlord, a cruel _person_ , and it’s only now, guided by her Gabrielle and her wide-eyed ideals, that she’s starting to realise it’s something to be ashamed of. If her Gabrielle had any idea the sorts of terrible things the ‘warrior princess’ put other human beings through, she would turn around and run back to Poteidaia without a second thought.

There’s nothing new in what she sees on Gabrielle’s skin. At least, there shouldn’t be. The criss-crossed whip scars on her shoulders, her back, tell stories that only other slaves or their owners understand. They’re not the kind of stories Xena’s Gabrielle would ever tell, and Xena has worked very hard to make sure she never hears them either. She’s told these stories far too many times herself, and heard others whisper them with echoes of her name. Gabrielle is supposed to be a thing apart from that life, those experiences. She’s supposed to be a thing apart from this kind of pain.

Xena is no stranger to scars or wounds like these ones. She just never thought she’d ever see them on Gabrielle’s body.

Gabrielle is staring up at her, that same emotionless look on her face. “He likes to make examples,” she says, flat and void of sentiment.

“I can see that,” Xena manages, and has to swallow to keep her voice from quaking.

She can’t stop her fingers from doing the same, though. Her fingertips tremble like a child when she reaches out to touch her, to find the place where the skin was flayed from her shoulder. It’s smooth now, different from the roughness and the callouses she sees elsewhere, but Gabrielle doesn’t flinch when she makes contact. She reacts a little — Xena can feel the muscle going tight underneath — but she’s not resisting or pulling away. The touch isn’t unexpected; Xena wonders with red-tinted rage if Mezentius touches her like this, studying his handiwork with a kind of sick pride.

No, she thinks sadly. She knows him too well to hope for such a thing. If he does touch her, it’s definitely not like this.

“Never again,” she hears herself hiss, the vehemence surprising her but not Gabrielle. “Never again.”

Gabrielle hisses too, a choked-down breath that rattles in her throat. She does flinch, then, not at the contact but at the kindness that comes with it, more horrified by the promise of freedom than the memory of pain.

“Don’t,” she says, and for the first time since Xena saw her in that market there’s something other than bitterness or hollowness in her voice. “Don’t say things like that.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” Xena promises, ignoring the plea. “I’ll protect you. I’ll…” She reaches for her again, unable to help herself, biting down on the ache inside when she finds the scar-smooth skin. “I’ll make it up to you. Everything that’s happened to you, everything you’ve become… I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“Right.” Gabrielle laughs, empty again. “Because it’s your fault?”

 _Yes,_ Xena thinks, with a kind of desperation she hasn’t felt in a long time. _Yes, it’s my fault. Everything is my fault, but especially you. More than anything, you are my fault. I transformed the world and made it what it is, and that means I made you this way. I’m responsible, I’m the one who did this. I might as well have been holding that whip myself._

“That’s not important,” she says aloud, because how could she ever explain the truth to someone who barely even trusts her as it is? “This is wrong. That’s the only thing that matters. It’s _wrong_. And I’m going to make it right.”

“Yeah? And how are you going to do that?” There’s no sincerity in the question, and no curiosity either; it’s meant as an insult. “You’re a village twig. You’ve probably never worked a day in your whole life. Never fought anyone or anything, but somehow you’re going to protect me? You’re going to keep me safe?” She shakes her head, throat tightening over another bitter laugh. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Xena opens her mouth to point out that she’s flattened armies all on her own, that she once had entire nations under her thumb. _I have many skills,_ she wants to say, but before she has a chance to get the words out she looks down at herself and remembers that it’s not true any more.

Gabrielle is right. Here, at least, Xena is nothing. She never left Amphipolis, never became a warrior, never conquered anyone or anything. This Xena, the one who never took up the sword, the one the Fates have bound to never spill a drop of blood in anger, can’t protect a former slave from anything. Who is she, this Xena, without the talents that have defined her for so much of her life? What is she when she can’t do any of the things she’s always done so naturally? Looking at this Gabrielle now, seeing the scars this world has left on her… for the first time in her life, Xena remembers how it feels to be helpless.

 _You’re right,_ she realises, struck dumb. _I can’t keep you safe. I can’t protect you. If Mezentius comes after you here, what can I do to stop him if I can’t shed his blood?_ She would kill the bastard for what he’s done to Gabrielle, and not regret it for an instant, but in this reality she’s not allowed. If she does it, the world will undo itself. She will become the person she was before, the one who did the same things Mezentius has done. She will become a monster.

Worse, she’ll lose her brother again.

Her brother, her Lyceus. He is everything in this reality that Gabrielle was in the other. He’s just as pure and kind as she was, just as soft-hearted and full of hope and love and warmth. It’s been so long since Cortese’s attack, but Lyceus hasn’t changed a bit. That light in his eyes is as bright and beautiful and perfect now as it was all those years ago, and Xena’s heart flares to life every time she sees him.

She won’t lose him again. She can’t sacrifice one person for another. Not for her mother, not for Gabrielle, not for anyone. Her mother is at peace now, freed from a world that would have found a way to strike her down no matter what; Gabrielle might be a little harder, but Xena has faith. She has to. This Gabrielle had the faith whipped out of her, the hope broken like her body. One of them needs to find it again. One of them needs to be the optimist, the one with the kindness and the wonder and the stories. One of them needs to be pure. If Gabrielle can’t do it for herself…

“I’ll do it,” Xena says. It’s a response to Gabrielle’s doubts, of course, but more than that it’s a response to her own. “I’ll find a way to protect you. I’ll find a way to bring you back. I’ll help you to remember who you were… who you still _are_. You’ll see. don’t have to trust me. You don’t have to believe me. You…”

But even as she says it, she tastes the lie.

Gabrielle has always believed in her. It’s the one constant, from the moment they first met, the moment Xena stepped in to save her from exactly this fate. In that moment, Gabrielle looked up at her and saw all the things Xena had never seen in herself, all the things she’d never even imagined she could be. Gabrielle does believe in her, and no matter how many times Xena failed her or let her down or got her hurt, that faith never faltered. Not for a moment, not for a heartbeat, not for anything. Xena might be able to find some faith in herself now, but will it be enough when the one person who has always seen her beauty now sees something ugly and frightening?

How fitting, she thinks bitterly, that Gabrielle can only see the Xena she was in the world where she wasn’t.

“Right,” Gabrielle says. She sounds so cold, so cynical, just like she did before she was free, when Xena tried to convince her such a thing was possible. “You can’t just change the world into what you want.”

Xena smiles. Given her deal with the Fates, she can’t help herself. “I can try,” she says again.

Gabrielle just rolls her eyes. Where her counterpart might have been a little awed by the cock-eyed optimism, this one is just tired. “Try this, then,” she snaps, and turns around to strip off the rest of her clothes.

It’s not a challenge. Xena knows what she’s doing, what she’s showing her. She knows that Gabrielle expects her to be shocked.

She is shocked. Truly, she is. Just not in the way that Gabrielle expects.

Gabrielle’s body is a slave’s body. Xena has seen dozens like it. The criss-crossed whip scars continue all the way down her back, long and livid, lessons learned in lesions. Xena can count them, the lessons and the lesions both, and she can guess pretty easily what breed of disobedience earned each one. She can guess too, though she wishes she couldn’t, what caused the bruises on her hips and her thighs, the week-old greens and yellows and the vibrant, violent purples that she probably got this morning. Xena doesn’t let her eyes linger there for too long, afraid of the sudden sting.

As before, it’s not the marks themselves that shock her. It’s seeing them on _her_.

Gabrielle watches her closely. There’s something new in her now, something almost cruel, and Xena realises with a sick start that she wants her to react like this this. It’s not enough just to shock her; she wants to _upset_ her. She wears her wounds like a badge, like the old Xena wore her breastplate and weapons, like the old Gabrielle wore her smiles and stories. She bears her experiences with pride, like they give her a kind of power, something that even Mezentius couldn’t take away from her. It makes her feel strong, Xena knows, seeing someone blanch and tremble at the sight of her, knowing that they could never endure the things she has.

It’s an ugly look on her, not the kind of pride that comes from her own strength but a sort of sadism, smugness at seeing someone else falter, satisfaction at being the cause of it. Xena knows that it’s no more or less than what she needed to survive but still it makes her soul feel weakened to see the way Gabrielle’s lip curls, the way she sneers and smirks and draws a kind of sordid pleasure from her discomfort.

“Not exactly the pretty picture you were expecting, huh?” Gabrielle asks coolly.

Xena washes the horror out of herself, summons the smile she would give if this was her Gabrielle, clean and sun-kissed and untouched, summons the sentiments she would feel if they were together and happy, if none of this ever happened.

“You’re beautiful,” she says.

Gabrielle laughs again, high and angry, and takes Xena by the wrist. Her grip is much, much stronger than her counterpart’s. The power in it, in _her_ , is almost more of a surprise than the fact that for the first time she’s the one touching Xena.

“Go on,” she says, challenging far more than inviting, and brings Xena’s hand to the bruises on her thighs, the darkest, the freshest, the newest. “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

Xena shakes her head, but she doesn’t try to pull away. She doesn’t want to use force, not even to resist something like this.

It’s too easy to assume Gabrielle is trying to prove something, that this is all about the way she sees Xena. It’s too easy to assume that she’s still trying to push her so-called benefactor into raising a hand against her, into showing her true colours and proving herself no better than Mezentius. Xena might even believe that, if not for the tremors in her thighs under their joined hands, and the way her eyelids flutter when they make contact with the bruises.

She’s testing herself too. Probably even more than she’s testing Xena, she’s pushing her own limits, rediscovering her own identity. She’s trying to figure out what she’s worth now, how things work for a battered, broken former slave, a person who has only ever been a thing. She’s been worthless and nameless for so long now, treated as an animal and broken down to less than nothing; she doesn’t know how to exist in a place where her value is measured in more than money or flesh.

Xena will not take her, not like this, but she understands. 

“That’s not going to happen,” she says, with as much compassion as she has, as much as the other Gabrielle has poured into her. “I just want to help you. That’s all I want. I promise.”

“I never asked you to help me,” Gabrielle mutters.

“I never asked you to help me either,” Xena says softly. “But you did.”

“What are you talking about?”

There’s power in her voice, but it comes from her whole body and it costs her dearly. Her grip slackens, weakened by the strength poured into her throat, and Xena takes advantage to pull her hand away. Careful, ever so careful, she raises it up to cup her face.

“Gabrielle…” she breathes, thumbs brushing her cheeks, and the need for words drains out of her.

She bends her head, as slow and sweet and loving as she can, and kisses the scars on her shoulder.

In the other world, the one she’s lost, she and Gabrielle are only just beginning to kiss and touch each other like this, to take these moments of contact and intimacy further than they did before. It’s a slow exploration, a learning curve for both of them; Xena is uncovering the parts of herself she buried long ago and Gabrielle is awakening inside herself, learning the wants of her heart and her body in rhythm with Xena’s breathing. They’re discovering themselves, both of them, in the moments they discover each other. It’s a beautiful, blessed thing, and Xena — who has always been so impatient, so fierce — is for the first time in her life content simply to cherish each moment as it comes.

She doesn’t cherish this. How could anyone, seeing the woman they love marred by so much violence? Her lips tremble against the skin, tears trembling too behind her eyes, but she doesn’t let them fall. She holds there for a heartbeat, just one, then pulls away again, flooded with more emotion than she’s ever felt in a single moment, regret and pain and a desperate ache to just hold this girl, this _Gabrielle_ until all those marks dissolve completely, until there’s nothing left in either one of them, not even a memory that she once looked like this, that she once hurt so terribly that the brands still remain.

Her hands are still there at her face, tracing the curves like a blind sculptor, and Gabrielle reaches up, slowly, so slowly, to cover Xena’s knuckles with her palm. There are almost as many callouses there as there are on Xena’s own, and that’s another kind of torment, another kind of regret. Her Gabrielle has never known such labour, or such cruelty.

“You can’t,” Gabrielle is saying again, quiet this time, like maybe she’s a little regretful as well. “Whatever you think you see in me, it doesn’t exist. Maybe it did once, but it’s gone now, and you can’t…” Her voice cracks, and she touches her shoulder, fingers pressing roughly to the place Xena can still taste on her lips. “You can’t kiss away the parts of me you don’t like. You can’t get rid of them. They _are_ me.” She takes a couple of steps back, out of Xena’s reach, and gestures down at herself, at the vicious scars ripped down her back, the bruises on her thighs, her hips, the work-hardened muscle in her stomach. “It’s all _me_.”

“I know,” Xena whispers. “But it’s not all you are. You’re more than what was done to you, Gabrielle. I know you are. I’ve seen it. You’re so much more.”

Gabrielle sucks in her breath, more annoyed than touched. “Well, maybe I don’t want to be more.”

Xena studies her long and hard. She can see the conflict rising in her, aimed not at the world this time but inside herself. She’s afraid now, Xena can see, worried that her own words are true, that Xena really is the one who doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that trust will only lead to disappointment for both of them. Xena wants to wrap her up in something warm and safe, to nurture her and bathe her in sunlight until she’s no longer afraid to grow.

“What do you want?” she asks.

Gabrielle stares at her again. There’s little left of that stone hardness now, so much of it chipped away, and the look in her eyes has become something wholly different. She’s not so sullen any more, not so bitter or spiteful or cold; she still doesn’t see her, not in the way Xena wants her to, but it’s closer than it was before. Inch by inch, breath by breath, she’s starting to see a person, something — no, some _one_ — more than just another potential owner, and it’s only now, as her mouth drops open but no sound comes out, that Xena realises it terrifies her.

Gabrielle doesn’t know what she wants. She only knows what she doesn’t, what she can’t, what she’s not allowed to. Maybe she wanted her freedom once, but the scars on her back are proof enough that it was flogged out of her long ago. Now there’s just a hole in her, an empty space, blank like her eyes, where she only knows what will get her beaten. She can’t remember how it feels to want anything.

She doesn’t say anything. Xena can see that she wants to, no doubt some combination of her own wilfulness and having been punished too many times for not answering a question, but the words don’t come. That frightens her too, Xena can see, and she does’t know how to feel about that. It wasn’t her intention to make her feel like she has to say anything or want anything or be anything. She didn’t mean to make her feel trapped and angry, so ready to lash out or duck and run; she only wanted to see her want something, wish for something, _hope_ for something. She just wanted to see or hear some dream or prayer, some faint flicker of the Gabrielle she knows.

Instead, she gets silence and impotent anger and unvoiced panic, and she feels like a conquerer all over again.

“It’s okay,” she says again, because someone has to speak, because Gabrielle looks ready to run, because she is the reason why. “It doesn’t really matter. I was just curious, that’s all. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything.”

Gabrielle nods, then turns away. The lashes on her back seem to glow in the dim evening light. She finds Cyrene’s dress again, picks it up with a sober, measured look on her face. The fabric shimmers, the pale pink reflected in her eyes; it reminds Xena yet again of how colourless this Gabrielle is, how dead inside. Her Gabrielle would be lit up by this, the fabric lit up by her in turn; this one seems to bleed the life out of everything she touches, and Cyrene’s dress seems to fade and grow old under her hands.

“You said you’d leave me to change,” she says, cautious but very serious. It’s more than just a reminder, Xena can tell, and once again she knows what she should do. “You said…”

“I know.” The words weigh heavily. “I can do that, if you want. Say the word, and I’ll leave.”

Gabrielle stares at her for a long, long time, clenching and unclenching her jaw, her shoulders, her fist. Every part of her is wrung tight as a drum, tight as the whips that left their mark on her. She is so frightened and so angry, so many things that Xena once prayed she would never, ever see on that face, but it’s not just that any more. Hidden away underneath all that, barely visible and breathtakingly fragile, there’s a glimpse of something new, something small and soft and sweet, something that, if she looks at it from just the right angle and in just the right way, becomes familiar.

“No,” Gabrielle says at last. She turns back, very slowly, and stands there like a child in front of her, exposed in all her strength and scars and experience. “Don’t leave me.” Her voice drops to a whisper, a breath, a shiver, and she hands over the dress with soul-shattering carefulness. “Help me?”

This time, Xena doesn’t try to hide the tears that well in her eyes.

The dress feels lighter than air now as the fabric slides between her fingers. It’s worn out from age and use, but it feels as familiar as Gabrielle’s skin. It’s different in this reality, stretched and faded in different places, but it’s still so much a part of her mother, still so much a part of the past that Xena remembers, even now, with so much fondness.

Gabrielle is much the same, she thinks. She’s broken and bruised and burned, damaged in ways her counterpart can’t even imagine, but Xena has to believe that she carries the same heart inside of her. She has to believe that there’s enough left of it to salvage, enough left to breathe back to life.

In the other reality, Xena made herself Gabrielle’s protector. But this place is very different, and this Gabrielle is right when she says that a ‘village twig’ can’t do anything to protect a runaway slave. They’re both different here, a Gabrielle who is rough and hard and a Xena who is soft and meek and kind. Xena needs to be Gabrielle here; she needs to do whatever she can, whatever it takes, to make sure this Gabrielle never becomes that Xena.

“Of course I’ll help you,” she breathes, and wonders if Gabrielle understands that she’s not talking about the dress.

Gabrielle’s breathing is rough and ragged, like she’s on the verge of panic, like the thought of letting Xena so close, even after she’s kissed her skin, bleeds her dry. Xena stays where she is, keeps the dress in her hands, and waits for her to steady herself. She will not touch her again without permission.

“It might be too big,” Gabrielle says.

Looking at her now, naked and exposed and standing upright for once, Xena realises that she’s right. It certainly will be.

It’s a gutting thought. Her mother is — _was_ — a strong woman, much like the Gabrielle Xena remembered when she said, without thinking, _“she was about your size”_. Gabrielle, the one who doesn’t exist any more, never really realised how impressive her physique was, how much presence she might have if she could just find a touch or two of confidence. She was clumsy and awkward, untried and untested like so many village girls are, but she had potential enough to take Olympus if she wanted it, and it didn’t take very long at all for life with Xena to burn that village-girl greenness into hard, lean muscle.

This Gabrielle is lean too, and just as strong, but she wears it very differently. Her muscle is sinew, her body skin and bone. She’s never had enough to eat, and she works much harder than she should. Her body is used to struggling, and her strength reflects that; it’s a feral kind of strength, the kind that spawns from desperation and hunger. The other Gabrielle could bring the world to its knees with a smile; this one could strangle a man with her bare hands.

That’s a sobering thought, and a frightening one, but Xena dismisses it because she knows better. She could, but she won’t. She _won’t_ , because she is still Gabrielle, because some things don’t change even when the rest of the world does, because there has to be enough of her left inside that _that_ won’t ever happen. Xena isn’t the kind of woman who has ever had faith in anything, but she has faith enough in Gabrielle to shake the earth and the heavens. Whatever this slave girl might be capable of, whatever she might feel, Xena knows she would never, ever do something like that. She can’t. She’s _Gabrielle_.

Still, though, the differences between their bodies strike deep and hard. The other Gabrielle is so clean, a piece of parchment waiting to hold some epic poem, her body lineless and pure. This one is the opposite; her life is written all over her, even in the places untouched by scars or bruises. Xena wants to punch herself for thinking, even in a stupid moment of idealism, that this girl could ever wear the same clothes that her Gabrielle can.

Gabrielle, this one, says _“it might be too big,”_ but Xena knows that’s not really what she means. She means _‘I might not be able to wear it,’_ and just like Xena she’s not really talking about the dress. She’s worried that she won’t be able to adapt to the life Xena’s offering her, that she won’t be able to change in the way she needs. She doesn’t realise that it’s enough that she’s thinking about these things, enough that she cares about them at all. She doesn’t realise that this is a change in itself, that she has become so much more than she was even just a few angry, frightened minutes ago.

Xena looks down at the dress, then up at Gabrielle. The fabric is wrinkled again, and she smoothes it out, wishing she could do the same to the lines on Gabrielle’s face, the scars on her shoulders, the bruises on her thighs, all the places this world made imperfect. She wishes she could rewrite her life as easily as she can resize a dress, but that’s a task best left to the Fates. She can only work with what’s here, the fabric of Gabrielle’s body, the tatters of her heart, her soul, her spirit. There is so much of her that needs mending and tending, but Xena knows how beautiful it will be when it thrives.

She finds a smile, finds her faith, finds Gabrielle’s eyes.

“It’ll be all right,” she says. “We’ll make it fit.”

—


End file.
